Advances in electronic technologies have enabled users of computing devices (e.g., computers, tablets, smart phones) to find, connect, and request rides from other users in a transportation network. For example, modern technologies facilitate transportation services by receiving a ride request from a rider and assigning a driver to the facilitate the ride. To facilitate user interaction with digital content related to a ride, a driver, or other rider information, conventional transportation systems often provide graphical user interfaces as part of receiving and matching a ride request from a rider with a driver. These conventional systems, however, have several disadvantages and drawbacks.
One disadvantage, for example, is that conventional transportation systems often provide a static graphical user interface (e.g., via a mobile computing device) that does not provide a driver with relevant information about a rider or ride request. For instance, many conventional transportation systems primarily display a map that includes a route and directions from the driver location to a pickup location of a rider. However, at various points of between accepting a ride request and completing a ride, a driver often needs to access information relevant to the ride request or rider. With conventional systems, a driver must manually navigate away from the map to locate such information, which typically requires the driver to locate and access a series of buttons within a graphical user interface.
Not only do graphical user interfaces of conventional transportation systems result in a potential safety issue (e.g., a driver attempting to manually access information while driving), such conventional graphical user interfaces also result in a relatively time-consuming process for a driver to access relevant ride information (e.g., rider rating, rider contact information, or number of riders). In many cases, a driver needs to access ride information to accept and complete a ride request. For example, a driver can want to verify a rider rating prior to accepting a ride request, or a driver can need to call a rider to coordinate the pickup of the rider. Due to the inefficiencies of accessing ride information within conventional systems, the overall efficiency of conventional transportation systems suffers. Indeed, a delay in accessing ride information can result in a delay in completing a ride request, and when considering the large number of ride requests, the combined effect of each delay can result in significant inefficiencies throughout a transportation network.
Another disadvantage of conventional transportation systems is that they do not effectively provide communication between drivers and riders, which often leads to unnecessarily cancelled rides. For example, in many conventional systems, if a driver does not readily see a rider upon arriving at a designated pickup location, the driver can often abandon the ride request without picking up the rider. In these situations, however, the rider can still want a ride and can be relatively close to the pickup location. Nevertheless, due to the communication friction between driver and rider of conventional transportation systems, the driver can abandon the ride request rather than hassle with trying to communicate with the rider. The abandonment of a ride request results in a host of inefficiencies within conventional transportation systems, e.g., assigning the abandoning driver a new ride request (often having a different pickup location), receiving a second ride request from the abandoned rider, processing the second ride request, and assigning a new driver to pick up the rider.
Furthermore, technical limitations in conventional transportation systems often introduce additional inefficiencies in situations where the actual number of riders differs from the number of riders reported in the ride request. For example, a ride request sent to a driver can indicate a single rider. However, when the driver arrives at the pickup location, the driver can learn that, in fact, there are two or more riders. In order to correct this mistake, the driver or rider must cancel the current ride request and send a new ride request with the correct number of riders. In this situation, the driver has lost time driving to the pickup location, and the rider has lost time waiting for the original driver. Moreover, additional computational resources within the transportation network are required to receive a new ride request, assign the driver another route, and assign a new driver to the new ride request. Accordingly, conventional transportation systems often result in inefficient management of resources in which the actual number of riders differs from the number of riders reported in the ride request.
Thus, there are several disadvantages with regard to the conventional transportation systems.